1. Field of the Invention
The invention disclosed and claimed herein generally pertains to a method for debugging errors in a document, wherein a client side document is dynamically created from a plurality of different server side sources. More particularly, the invention pertains to a method of the above type wherein a document source debugger is used to identify the particular server side source in which the error originated. Even more particularly, the invention pertains to a method of the above type wherein the source of error can be determined on the client side.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a data transfer network such as the Internet, it has become quite common to provide client side web browsers or the like with documents that are generated dynamically by computer programs, rather than being produced from static documents. For example, HTML pages are often dynamically generated by executing server side programs or program components, such as JavaServer Pages (JSP), Servlet or Portlet. Moreover, a page can be created from multiple server side sources, such as two or more of these or other programs or program components.
When an error is discovered from client-side, such as, a web browser, in a dynamically created document of the above type, it may be necessary to determine the server side source that originally produced the error, so that the error can be fixed. As an example, this can be important for system compliance validation, in regard to issues such as system security, quality and accessibility. In such compliance validation, a validation program applies validation rules to a document, such as HTML, PDF or XML document, to identify compliance errors in the document. However, even if source of error detection is important for these issues, it can be difficult to identify, in a multi-source arrangement, the particular source that originated the error.
This identification problem is complicated even further, when the source for some of the content of the document is a server side script, such as JSP or Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP). Before being executed, a script of this type may need first to be transformed to a target source. For example, an original input source comprising JavaServer Page (JSP) script must be transformed into a target source, such as Java Servlet class before it can be executed. Complexities such as these have generally made it difficult to identify errors, even more difficult to fix them in dynamically generated pages of the above type, particularly from the client side. Such difficulties in turn interfere with system compliance validation efforts.